Description
The seaborne movement of people, animals, goods, knowledge, and beliefs was a ubiquitous aspect of the period and geographical area commonly known as the ‘Viking world’. This is indicated by an increasing body of evidence from various disciplines that links people, places and things across maritime space, but this evidence does little more than provide us with points of origin and destination, deposition or burial. Much remains to be understood about maritime travel per se, both from a practical point of view, and from what we might call a cognitive or ontological one, by which I mean the way Viking Age mariners experienced sailing voyages, and how this experience engendered particular mental geographies and afforded culturally-specific worldviews.In this presentation I will tackle several themes relating to Viking Age travel in light of experimental trial voyages conducted in 2022 along known Viking Age sailing routes, focusing on aspects of route choice, risk judgement, and the location of anchorages and havens. The goal with this approach is to reconstruct the “scapes” of Viking Age seafaring: the seafaring routes and environments, but also the practices and mindscapes entangled with maritime travel. It is hoped that through this approach, we can discover not only where people travelled, but also what these journeys were like, what understandings of the world they were entangled in, and how these afforded the practices observable in the surviving evidence.
I argue that both the voyages themselves and the mental geographies of the voyagers were afforded by the profoundly dynamic, contextual, collective, and uncertain nature of seafaring practice in the Viking Age. These practices were shared between seafaring communities throughout the Viking world, and may in fact have also “travelled” across time, creating a continuous heritage of maritime practice extending from the eve of sailing technology to the end of the 19th century.
| Period | 2023 May 3 |
|---|---|
| Event type | Conference |
| Location | Odense, DenmarkShow on map |
| Degree of Recognition | International |
Subject classification (UKÄ)
- Archaeology